The Fourth Expedition lands on Mars in the middle of a cold night. Jeff Spender, the archaeologist, collects scattered wood and starts a small fire while Captain Wilder, Hathaway, and Sam Parkhill—who will all reappear in later stories—explore the landing zone on the “dead, dreaming world” (63). Other crew members question why Spender isn’t using the chemical fire from the ship, but Spender refuses to answer. Instead, he thinks, “it would be a kind of imported blasphemy” (64). The rest of the crew is raucous in their landing, celebratory after surviving the long space voyage.

A secondary rocket lands after an exploratory fly-over and reports that most Martian cities appear to have been abandoned for centuries but several bear fresh Martian corpses dead from chicken pox brought by the previous expeditions. The disease “burnt them black and dried them out to brittle flakes” (66).

Spender grows increasingly annoyed with the crass celebration of the rest of the crew, and the evening culminates with him punching a man named Biggs who is tossing empty bottles into a Martian canal. Captain Wilder chastises Spender and fines him but indicates that he shares Spender’s sympathies with the vanished Martian culture.